Siris Gallinat studied Business and Economics at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Then, after interning and traveling for a year, she moved to Sweden to complete a master in Film and Media Production at Lund University. After moving to London for a greater variety of creative options she started doing temp jobs while writing scripts and poetry and is currently working on a documentary about bisexuality.

Words are dangerous. Speaking out has an effect; it might make people question their own way of thinking and behaving.

Why change something if it’s not too bad, not bad enough?

This is a way of shutting down debate, a way of silencing marginalised groups, because their problems are not “real problems”, because they have “enough rights”, because they are “equal enough”.

We constantly have to decide whether to speak up or not, always calculating if it’s worth the exposure.

We have to constantly justify our opinions and risk censure as “angry feminist”.

Silencing people in calling them angry, which, especially for women, implies they were overly emotional or overreacting, is one of the tools to oppress their opinion and, eventually, avoid change.

Dangerous women speak up, anyway.

Dangerous Bisexuals

As a bisexual it feels like you have to come out twice, as my friend described it. This means speaking up twice, speaking up to all the people who comfortably fit in their boxes, people who already put you in a box after they saw you with that man or woman. You have to deal with not being taken seriously, being asked whom you are “really into”, being asked to choose your box.

You are dangerous because you might let them question their own box.

I started not only to mention my bisexuality when I get into a situation where I feel like I have to clarify things, but to also bring it up randomly in the process of getting to know a person, as a small mission to increase visibility!

Now, let’s introduce the two dangerous women who I am referencing in the poem:

Hannah Arendt who wrote political and philosophical theories that were very controversial at the time, e.g. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, for which she was strongly criticized, especially by her own community as a German Jew (cf. Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative, by D. Diner and R. Bashaw).

The other one is Sylvia Plath who bravely expresses her pain and struggle in her poems.